Thursday, January 22, 2009

Linux & Teachers - Part II

This is the second part to the Linux & Teachers written by my friend Ankur who blogs here:
This piece might come across as one intended to bad mouth my own college, but I have a sneaking suspicion that things aren’t all rosy in other parts of the country either.
I suppose every geek has had this same feeling before. You take a seat in the front row of your first Introduction to Programming lecture, all worked up about the fact that here, finally, is a class you can be on top of. The professor walks in, gives a little introduction, and you realize it’s going to be a long, long semester.
Today I decided to make a list of all the atrocities committed by my Introduction to Programming professor. I wasn’t expecting much because, even though he sounded like a complete knucklehead to the geek inside me, I was sure he at least knew the textbook inside-out. I was, as one would expect, wrong. So, hackers, get ready to cringe. Here’s my list.

… Linux is basically a DOS based OS.

These days we are using 128 and 256 bit processors.

A compiler is a software that converts code written in a particular programming language to machine code. To compile a program, you must hit ALT+F9. (It took me a while to realize he was talking about the Borland Turbo C++ IDE from 1992, a prehistoric compiler Indian colleges use for all C and C++ courses.)

The object code generated by a C++ compiler is almost identical to that produced by a Java compiler.

The first high level language was Ada, also known as Smalltalk. (This was a big WTF moment.)

The second high level language was COBOL, which was an improvement over Ada. (Cringe, cringe, cringe.)

FOTRAN came after COBOL. (No, “FOTRAN” is not a typo. This is what he said.)

FOTRAN, COBOL, Ada and Smalltalk were not general purpose languages.

This one is classic: C was the first language to run on UNIX systems. All languages before C ran only on Windows.